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“Two Prosecutors,” “Palestine ’36,” and the Tribulations of Resistance in the Thirties

2026-03-21 08:06:02

2026-03-20T23:33:14.737Z

For much of the superbly chilling historical drama “Two Prosecutors,” we are inside a Soviet prison in the city of Bryansk, in 1937, during Stalin’s widespread purge of his political enemies in the Communist Party. We know we are inside because the Ukrainian writer-director Sergei Loznitsa has brought us there, step by agonizing step, with none of the shortcuts that might have tempted a less disciplined observer. In the opening moments, Loznitsa, working with the Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, plants the camera before the prison gates, which open with a loud creak, allowing a fresh batch of emaciated arrivals to shuffle into a work yard. An old man, bearded and solemn, is assigned a special task, and the camera watches patiently as he is led up a stairwell, down a corridor, and into a cell with a furnace, where he’s ordered to burn the contents of a large sack. “Don’t think you can hide even a scrap,” a guard warns, for the bag contains evidence: letters written by Party members inside the prison, all protesting their innocence of crimes they’ve been charged with and testifying to experiences of abuse and torture under detainment.

All of this looks and sounds too grim for words, but stick with it, for there is a purpose—and, crucially, an urgent dramatic pulse—to Loznitsa’s deliberation. His filmmaking has an immense physical weight; he wants to convey not only the dreary look of prison, all dim lighting and bare gray walls, but also a crushing sense of immobility, as if the camera, like an inmate, could move only when granted permission. Sometime later, a neatly dressed, sombre-faced young prosecutor named Kornev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) will arrive at the prison on important business, and he, too, is escorted by the camera every step of the way. Doors and gates are slowly unlocked, guards stare impassively from the sidelines, and, eventually, he meets with a politely useless duty assistant, to whom he makes his request known. Kornev has come into possession of a letter from one of the prisoners, I. S. Stepniak, requesting a visit from the prosecutor’s office, so that he can share some “vital information.”

Stepniak’s note, we learn, was written in blood—a detail that likely awakened the letter burner’s sympathy and compelled him, in a courageous (and possibly final) act of defiance, to smuggle the missive out. Kornev’s visit to the prison is another bit of bravery, born of a newcomer’s naïve belief in the system; he was, we learn, appointed a prosecutor only three months earlier. (“Do you know where your predecessor is now?” someone asks, ominously.) In pursuing an audience with Stepniak, Kornev is taking on not only the prison authorities but also Stalin’s secret police, the N.K.V.D. For the next several hours—the film, though extraordinarily rigorous, is not bound by the strictures of real time—Kornev’s persistence will be met with deflections, delays, and excuses. Such a visit requires official permission, he’s told; the prisoner is ill and contagious. “Don’t forget about the risk of infection,” the prison governor says, and there’s more menace than concern in his warning; he’s referring to an ideological contaminant, not a physical one.

By the time Kornev is finally ushered into the cell of Stepniak (a mesmerizing Aleksandr Filippenko), there’s no sense of triumph or even anticipation about what he will discover. Stepniak’s account is terrifying, though not terribly surprising: he is one of many Old Bolsheviks who have been strategically targeted by Stalin’s regime, and his “vital information” is written, in part, in the wounds and scars covering his battered body. Stepniak was also once a lawman himself—he’s the other prosecutor of the film’s title—and Kornev, who regards him as something of a mentor, is determined to live up to their shared ideals. Loznitsa neither sentimentalizes nor mocks this impulse; for him, the human will to resist, to cling fast to integrity and courage in the face of a mounting totalitarian horror, is something as real, as undeniable, and therefore worth acknowledging, as the horror itself.

Loznitsa, who has lived in Berlin since 2001, has been making films for more than two decades, most of them nonfiction. These include “The Invasion” (2024), a portrait of everyday Ukrainian life during wartime, though he has previously revisited the Stalin era in archival documentaries, such as “The Trial” (2019) and “State Funeral” (2021). The director’s easy traverse between past and present, and between fiction and nonfiction, has accumulated its own meaning over time: fascism persists now as it did then, and its horrors are inexhaustible in any medium. So it is with “Two Prosecutors,” which is Loznitsa’s first fictional narrative in some time, though it is informed by real-life experience. The story is drawn from a novella by the Soviet physicist Georgy Demidov, who spent fourteen years in the Gulag as a political prisoner; he wrote it in 1969, but it wasn’t published until 2009, long after his death.

Not having read Demidov’s story, I can’t assess Loznitsa’s adaptation on the basis of narrative fidelity, although there is one purely cinematic coup—a structural doubling—that undoubtedly belongs to him and the astoundingly versatile Filippenko. That doubling underscores the film’s title and its structure, which is ingeniously bifurcated: the movie runs just under two hours, and the second hour, which follows Kornev as he seeks to report his findings to the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow, holds up a brilliantly warped mirror to the first. The Moscow offices are, of course, nicer than the Bryansk prison cells, with wood panelling in lieu of ashen concrete, but even here Kornev is subject to the same evasions and veiled threats, the same pointless waiting games, the same hush of conspiracy that, he realizes too late, has already eyed him as its next target. Loznitsa’s methods are grim and exacting, but the effect is never monotonous; there are shivers of Hitchcockian suspense, plus a whispery cackle of satire that veers toward the Kafkaesque. Whether Kornev is navigating the bowels of a prison or a labyrinth of bureaucratic absurdity, the rooms and anterooms he must pass through are like successive circles of Hell. Once he reaches the core, his sense of entrapment, and ours, is total.

Like “Two Prosecutors,” “Palestine ’36,” the fourth feature from the Palestinian director and screenwriter Annemarie Jacir, unfolds at a politically and existentially precarious moment in the nineteen-thirties. The similarities end there. Jacir’s film, which was short-listed (but not nominated) for the Oscar for Best International Feature, has no use for art-film solemnity. Conceived as a robust classical entertainment, it is blunt and sprawling where Loznitsa’s picture is precise and concentrated, and it pointedly frames resistance as a collective rather than a solo enterprise. The title sets the scene: the story begins in British-controlled Palestine, in 1936, and then tracks, on multiple narrative fronts, the three-year Arab revolt against the mounting injustices of mandatory rule. Chief among these is a British partition plan, well under way, to establish an Israeli state in Palestine; Jewish refugees, fleeing persecution in Europe, are already arriving en masse and building settlements in the countryside. As tension erupts between Jewish settlers and Palestinian rebels, the British police and Army enforce an indiscriminate crackdown on Arab villagers, confiscating their land, enforcing curfews, limiting travel, and beating and arresting any who resist. The Nakba of 1948 is still about a decade away, but its catastrophic legacy has already begun.

In one scene, Arthur Wauchope (a suitably plummy Jeremy Irons), the British High Commissioner for Palestine, is confronted at his office in Jerusalem by a group of female Palestinian protesters, and he offers up a condescending explanation of why so many must be punished for the sins of a few: “As you know better than anyone, the Arab holds the community in higher value than the individual.” Jacir is measured enough to grant this assumption a modicum of truth: when rebels on horseback stop and board a locomotive, what ensues is less a great train robbery than a great train fund-raiser, in which the Arab passengers part happily with their possessions (“For the revolution,” a woman declares, surrendering her jewelry). Elsewhere, though, as events gather pace—the Arabs stage a months-long general strike, the British launch an investigation into the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict—the film productively undermines the notion of an easy, monolithic Palestinian solidarity. Its strength lies in the creation of characters who, although sometimes forced to function stiffly as rhetorical mouthpieces, seem genuinely conflicted and caught off guard by the brutal interventions of history.

The first character we meet is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya, in a soulful-eyed screen début), a farmer’s son from the village of Al Basma, who, longing to slip the bonds of rural life, begins working in Jerusalem as a driver for a wealthy newspaper owner, Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine). But rising tensions and encroachments keep pulling Yusuf back to Al Basma; at one point, he is called upon to represent the interests of impoverished Palestinian farmers, who are at risk of losing their livelihoods—not just to Jewish settlers but to the wealthy Palestinian landowners who are happy to sell off their fields for higher profits. “Is Zionism really so bad for us? For business?” one of them asks, and his question will hang over the picture like a miserable portent. Amir, who has set his sights on political office, proves similarly amenable to the British agenda—to the chagrin of his activist wife, Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), who has been writing about the village conflicts in Amir’s newspaper. (In a nod to the sexism of the era, Khuloud has to employ a male pseudonym to be taken seriously.)

Jacir has approached questions of Palestinian identity in all of her previous features; “Salt of This Sea” (2010) and “Wajib” (2018) were both set in the present day; “When I Saw You” (2014) takes place at a Jordanian refugee camp in 1967. Venturing deeper into the past, “Palestine ’36” is an ambitious work. Jacir’s skillful evocations of pre-Nakba Palestine, particularly her images of a bustling, thriving Jerusalem, have the quality of a sun-drenched paradise lost. (The film was shot in several Palestinian locations after the attacks of October 7, 2023.) These scenes are supplemented by occasional archival clips from the period, which offer us a rare glimpse of Jewish refugees up close. They are otherwise undifferentiated and undramatized, in what feels like a strategic corrective on Jacir’s part—a refusal to grant them a narrative primacy that Palestinians have long been denied.

Even so, there’s a mercy in the omission. “Palestine ’36” is anti-colonialist to the core, and Jacir reserves her most damning critique for the High Commissioner and his colleagues. The film’s most odious villain is Orde Wingate (Robert Aramayo), a British Army captain and Christian Zionist who leads the brutal crackdowns on Palestinian villages. On the opposite side is the High Commissioner’s thoughtful, compassionate secretary, Thomas Hopkins (Billy Howle), who is sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight and tries to advise them at every step, to little avail. Hopkins is, perhaps, the closest thing this story has to a Kornev—a principled outsider who ultimately overestimates the value of his own empathy and knowledge. Exasperated by the fruitlessness of his labors, Hopkins finally declares, “I quit Palestine!” Jacir is not, I think, unsympathetic to such a response, but she also doesn’t grant it the final word. “Palestine ’36” ends on an evocative image of peaceful protest—a long and ongoing march toward justice that extends from its era into ours. ♦

Why Israel Is Attacking Lebanon

2026-03-21 05:06:01

2026-03-20T20:12:57.725Z

Soon after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Hezbollah—a paramilitary group and a political party that wields tremendous power in Lebanon, and is an Iranian proxy—struck back, firing missiles at Israel. Israel retaliated with strikes and a “limited” ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Even though the Iranian front of the war has received significantly more attention in the global press, the reality on the ground in Lebanon is staggering: the Israeli attacks have already killed more than a thousand people, and displaced upward of a million, in a country of some five million. The displacement orders affected more than fourteen per cent of the country. And many Lebanese are concerned that Israel intends to eventually redraw the border between the two countries.

To better understand this part of the widening Middle East conflict, I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who lives in Lebanon and was in Beirut when we talked. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the roots of Lebanon’s long political crisis, how Israel’s war in Gaza changed Lebanese society, and what Israel really hopes to achieve with its bombing campaign in Lebanon.

Can you describe the political situation in Lebanon leading up to the October 7th attacks? Because the period after that is when Israel has been especially aggressive in Lebanon, at least in recent years.

God, it feels like a lifetime ago, honestly. I think the situation prior to October 7th was pretty much status quo, both internally, within the country, but also in the country’s relationship with Israel. The last war between Israel and Lebanon was in 2006. The cessation of hostilities, or ceasefire, that was put in place at the end of that conflict was holding. There was very little interaction along the border. In 2022, an agreement was struck between Lebanon and Israel to finalize the delineation of our maritime borders. And, as for the land borders, some of the disputed points had been resolved.

Internally, in Lebanon, there was a power struggle between the various political parties. Hezbollah still had quite a bit of political power. They were the central political power, in many ways. And then you had the Lebanese government forces on the other side, who were basically the heads of various militias during the Lebanese civil war who had simply moved from the street into government at the end of hostilities, in 1989. There had been growing resentment of that political class within Lebanon, especially after a series of protest movements in 2019, when the country seemed to be facing economic collapse. And the protests were about how grossly the country was being mismanaged, but also that a majority of Lebanese people, across all sectarian groups, were fed up.

So that movement against Lebanon’s political status quo had quite a bit of momentum, but it was derailed. One of the reasons why it was derailed was something that took a lot of us by surprise but shouldn’t have, which was how fast Hezbollah came to the fore to defend the system. It derailed the protest movement within weeks. I remember those protests as such a moment of hope. People were energized like I’ve never seen before.

Did Hezbollah dislike the protest movement because the fractured nature of Lebanese politics gave them a way of wielding de-facto power?

It was that—the extent to which they were invested in the system as is. The division of power between six political leaders from different sectarian backgrounds gave them outsized political power. Of course, the arms also gave them power within that system. So, on the one hand, part of Hezbollah’s discourse is a commitment to anti-corruption, et cetera. None of this has ever happened, and at the same time they were very invested in making sure that the demonstrations quickly diminished. And then COVID came, and then the catastrophic Beirut port explosion that derailed the process as well.

So how would you describe the period from October 7th until early March of this year? What changed?

In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Hezbollah made the decision to support Gaza by waging a low-intensity conflict on Israel’s northern borders. That opened the door for Israel. And I think this is where Hezbollah completely misread the situation. I don’t think many of us, frankly, understood the extent to which that created a shock within the system in Israel and within a society that already was veering to the right. So we saw an escalation. Israel was hitting deeper into Lebanon. And there were assassinations. And the response from Hezbollah was, We will respond at the time of our own choosing. They thought that, by maintaining a measured response to what Israel was doing, they could stave off a broader attack. But that did not work. And we saw that it did not work in September, 2024, when Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated, and there were these pager attacks on Hezbollah officials. This was interesting logistically, but it was also a terror operation. When you have pagers going off in public markets, in supermarkets, in pediatric offices, with children holding these pagers, the danger to civilians is quite significant.

You also have other countries, led by the United States, pressuring the central government of Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Did that not happen because of a lack of will on the part of the central government, or because it did not have the power to do so?

In terms of the relationship between Hezbollah and the central government, it was a very, very tenuous one, particularly after Nasrallah made the decision to join the fray and attack Israel, and then immediately afterward we had the war, which was followed by a cessation of hostilities, during which Hezbollah asked the speaker of parliament and the central government to basically negotiate with Israel on their behalf. And we ended up with a cessation of hostilities that was not to Hezbollah’s advantage. And, by then, Hezbollah really had been significantly weakened.

What we do know is that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (I.R.G.C.), by then, had gone from being macromanagers to something else. They had been involved at the macro level in managing Hezbollah. There was an I.R.G.C. member on the seven-member Shura Council of Hezbollah. After Nasrallah was killed, and the war had started, I.R.G.C. members were on the ground and helping lead the battles, if you like. And over the past year, they’ve been helping reformulate and reorganize the military arm of Hezbollah.

So, Hezbollah’s weakening by Israel led to more direct Iranian control?

Yes, they became a lot more hands-on with Hezbollah’s military operations. But then there were elections. And, in early 2025, we had a new President, and then there was the selection of a new Prime Minister and the new government. And this was a turning point. You had the election of a former Army chief as President, and then a Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, who is not from the traditional political élite. His family is well known. It’s a traditional political family, but he himself worked outside Lebanon as the president of the International Court of Justice, and comes from a legal background, and doesn’t have any business dealings with any of the political parties here.

In terms of Hezbollah, there was international pressure, but there was also domestic pressure. People assume that the demand for the state to mobilize and to take full authority over arms in the country from Hezbollah is simply an international request. It’s not. That desire has been building up within Lebanon among very different population groups, including the other political parties. Hezbollah, for the longest time, was strong-arming other parties, and they are accused of assassinating a former Prime Minister. And there was one other thing: on December 8, 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, and control of Syria changed hands. That also undermined Hezbollah significantly because the route via Syria for Iran to send weapons was no longer there or had become a lot more difficult to use. Iran had to pull out of Syria, having invested billions of dollars there.

So pressure against Hezbollah was growing internally and externally, and the government did things that were not well enough appreciated. There is a very delicate balance within Lebanon. You’ve got eighteen officially recognized sectarian communities, and most of the political parties represent these communities directly. But there was a seismic shift in the mind-set and in the approach of the Lebanese government toward Hezbollah. It was very clear in the decision of the cabinet to declare a state monopoly over arms on August 5, 2025.

And then, in September, the Army chief made a plan to clear out all Hezbollah arms from south of the Litani River. That was phase one, and it was verified internationally. The Army had operational control south of the Litani. Further proof is that, if you look at the location of the rockets that are going to Israel now, most of them, very few are coming from south of the Litani.

The criticism was that the Army was not moving fast enough. They should have been a lot more aggressive. There were requests from Israel. And the government’s response was, Look, Lebanon is doing what it can. You need to show that diplomacy works. You’re occupying five points in Lebanon. Why don’t you withdraw from one? Why don’t you declare a unilateral cessation of hostilities for a period of twenty days?

Because let’s not forget that, since the ceasefire in November, 2024, until just before this war started, the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was unilateral. Israel was continuing its bombing campaigns targeting members of Hezbollah, but many Lebanese civilians’ lives were also lost in the process. And that’s part of the logic that Hezbollah is using today, saying, Look, we didn’t respond to Israel’s attacks for a year and a half. And now we’re in a position where we knew that they were preparing to attack us, so we preëmpted it.

But I still think the Hezbollah decision to launch rockets after the Iran war started was foolish, and it dragged the country into a genuine abyss.

Hezbollah started firing rockets after the attack on Iran began, and it seems Israel was probably planning to use this as a pretext to start this massive campaign in Lebanon. What have you been able to tell from Israel’s choice of targets so far about what they may be trying to accomplish here?

I think, frankly, if Israel were interested in weakening Hezbollah further, they would have engaged diplomatically with the government. There were plenty of offers before all of this started. This could have been avoided because the Lebanese government had made a commitment that, should any rockets be fired by Hezbollah, the Army would apprehend and stop it. But Israel started responding immediately. So this was prepared. Israel was intending to come in. We’d been hearing about this for ages, that they were preparing for a ground invasion. There’s an element of targeted punishment of the Shia community, because it’s mostly their areas that are being hit by Israel for having supported or elected Hezbollah. But I can tell you that, when the war started, there was significant anger at Hezbollah for dragging us into this, but now some are rallying back around them, partly because of the brutality of the bombardment.

Many people are not happy with Hezbollah, but they feel that now is not the time to criticize.

Do you have faith that the Lebanese government would’ve acted against Hezbollah if Israel hadn’t attacked so quickly?

I think the Army would’ve gone after those who fired at Israel. Definitely. The political will to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israel is there. The next steps are a lot more challenging. Disarming and decommissioning Hezbollah requires a very strong army to be able to go in and find weapons depots and arrest people. To do that in a country where the sectarian balance is very delicate, you need to have at least one part of the Shia community politically supporting you. And what is very interesting for me is, when the government, after Hezbollah opened this front, held an emergency meeting, the Council of Ministers made the decision to consider Hezbollah’s military activities illegal and therefore prosecutable by law, to stop the visa-free arrangements between Lebanon and Iran, and to expel any I.R.G.C. members that are found in the country. That’s a seismic shift in the mentality. These are things we never thought we would see happen in a country like Lebanon, because going after Hezbollah, an armed group that represents at least part of the Shia community, could trigger civil strife. But three of the five Shia ministers did not protest this decision. The President has also offered direct talks with Israel.

The Israelis have said no, correct?

Yeah, I don’t think Iran or Israel wants to stop the war in Lebanon.

So, just to go back, then, to my question from before, what is it that you think Israel’s trying to accomplish here? And can you tell anything about their aims from the targets they’ve chosen to hit?

I think they’re trying to do a number of things. One, as I said, is a collective punishment for the Shia community. And we see this in many of the areas that are being targeted, because some of them include blanket-bombing the southern suburbs of Beirut. These are residential buildings. It’s not like the entire southern suburbs is one big arms depot. So many of these areas that are being targeted are really about broader collective punishment.

The second thing they’re trying to do is spread a sense of fear and paranoia, which they’re succeeding at in Lebanon. By directly targeting individuals, especially when they’re in apartment buildings and in hotels, you place a bull’s-eye on every member of the Shia community. People are scared to take them in. There’s a lot of concern about having displaced people around you. It’s really an environment of paranoia and fear that we saw glimpses of in 2024. The Lebanese, as you know, I mean, they’re very hospitable when there’s a problem—they all jump in. When I think back to 2006, N.G.O.s opened their doors. Everyone was trying to help. This time, it’s a lot more muted.

And then the third thing is, now it looks like Israel is looking to occupy a very large part of south Lebanon. It’s not just to the Litani. We have to wait and see where this is going to end. Will they ultimately withdraw back to the border, or are they trying to renegotiate everything again? Because you had the minister of energy in Israel two days ago say, We should reconsider the maritime borders as well, the ones that were agreed to. Are they trying to maintain what they call a buffer zone, and I call occupied Lebanese territory, where you already have thirty-seven villages that have been completely vaporized, and therefore no one would be able to go back? So it’s just not clear to me where the Israeli government wants to go with this. They must want to negotiate from a position of strength, but they already have that. They have complete control over our skies.

But this mass expulsion of people will create tensions within Lebanon. Already, there are many tensions on the ground, and it’s going to create even greater tensions down the road. And this is why, again, the Army’s being very careful in trying to demobilize or decommission certain areas, because you can trigger these tensions at any moment.

No problem if you don’t feel like answering this question, but what has life been like for you recently?

Look, it’s been exhausting. It’s emotionally . . . It’s very difficult, partly because you’re seeing your country being ripped apart, and there’s a sense of helplessness. I’m in a domain where we’re supposed to be looking for creative solutions and off-ramps and thinking of all of this, but it’s very difficult to see an off-ramp in this environment, where we’re just on an escalatory path on the way to nowhere. This country is literally trapped. You have Israel on one side, Iran on the other. So, for me, it’s been very, very difficult to see all of this play out, and then you have to do stuff while you are being professional, unemotional. It’s very hard. And there’s the personal side also, where, I mean, my father’s buried in an area that I no longer can go to. So there’s a sense of . . . I get emotional about this because I’m having a hard time processing this. ♦



Is Cuba Trump’s Next Target?

2026-03-21 02:06:02

2026-03-20T18:00:00.000Z

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The staff writer Jon Lee Anderson has reported from Cuba for many years, and recently wrote about the deteriorating economic conditions on the island. His newest piece for the magazine dives into the potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s desire to pursue regime change. Anderson explores the economic impact of the United States blocking Venezuelan oil from reaching Cuba, which could be a death knell for the Communist government. Anderson and David Remnick discuss the current negotiations between the two countries, Marco Rubio’s strategy, and what cards the Cuban government might still hold. “They’re going to go into this,” Anderson suggests, “like maybe a canny poker player.”

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.



Ada Ferrer on America’s Imperial Adventures in Cuba

2026-03-21 02:06:02

2026-03-20T18:00:00.000Z

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The historian Ada Ferrer won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 book, “Cuba: An American History,” and she has one of the clearest views of the long and vexed relationship between the island and its giant neighbor. Ferrer left Cuba as an infant, coming to the United States with her mother in 1963 when Fidel Castro’s regime was arguably at its peak. David Remnick talks with Ferrer about the impact of U.S. sanctions, the economic collapse of Cuba, and what Donald Trump’s threat of a “takeover” means to the Cuban people and to Cuban Americans in the U.S.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.



Julio Torres Makes Everything Funny—Including Color Theory

2026-03-21 02:06:02

2026-03-20T18:00:00.000Z

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Julio Torres got his big break as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” and went on to make the cult favorites “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas” for HBO. He also wrote and directed the film “Problemista,” about a toy designer facing deportation. There’s a particular kind of surrealism to Torres’s humor; “I just don’t think his mind works quite like anyone else’s,” the staff writer Michael Schulman says, comparing Torres to “a guest lecturer at an art school . . . laying out his very particular way of seeing the world.” They met in New York to discuss the unique, synesthetic ideas about color which Torres describes in a new HBO special, “Color Theories,” and to check out a few hues at a nearby dollar store.

Thanks to Home in Heven and 3d Avenue Dollar & More.

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New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Daily Cartoon: Friday, March 20th

2026-03-20 23:06:01

2026-03-20T14:45:57.963Z
A man looks flummoxed over an “Is Winter Over” March Madness bracket thats between “Yes” and “No.”
Cartoon by Drew Dernavich